Four Corners [Part 2 of 2]
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“I have my sources. Thanks for confirming that it is the correct number. I’d hate to offer this job to anyone else.”
“Well,” Eames says, drumming his fingers in an arpeggio on the receiver, “should I be honored, or enquire as to the current extradition policies?”
“You’re not wanted in South Africa.”
“My dear Arthur, no British man is wanted in South Africa.”
Arthur laughs, and that can’t just be a trick of the hotel phone, not even in Calcutta. There’s a joke to be made about outsourcing but Eames can’t quite put it together. Eames wonders where Arthur is calling from. “I think they’d make an exception for the English Men’s National Football Team.”
“I doubt this job involves wearing a kit.”
“You’ll have to accept it to find out.”
It is easy for Eames to laugh, for him to put on an air of amicability. Talking to Arthur when Arthur isn’t here should really be much easier than this. “Who’s in?”
“Three. You, me, and Dom.”
“Pity. Is Mal having trouble with parasites again?”
“They had their second child last year, and no, she’s not pregnant. Just not coming. Which is, again, why we’re asking you.”
The prospect of working with extractors who behave professionally and don’t get Eames landed in prison in Thailand does have a rather distinct appeal. The prospect of working with an Architect like Dom again, in particular, has an appeal that’s even rational, reliable. And Arthur-
Well. That just makes things interesting.
“You’ll forgive me, darling, but I’m going to make one phone call before I accept.”
“Let’s hope that’s the only habit you acquired in prison.”
“Give me a way to reach you.”
“Try,” Arthur says, and hangs up.
It takes a bit of forwarding, since the directory on Eames’ cell phone is somewhere in the South China Sea with, of course, the rest of his cell phone, and Eames has no memory for numbers. Still, with some wrangling and a distinct lack of Internet he manages to find Miles at a Paris area code, in his office (and then his classroom) at the École Spéciale d’Architecture.
“You had better have a good excuse, Mr. Eames.”
“My god, have we gone back in time? Quick, Miles, what year is it?”
“Some of us can go back, you know,” he says, and however refreshing it is to hear Estuary English, Eames had hoped for a little more fondness. Perhaps that doesn’t translate well across continents. “Though I do believe, for you, the way is shut.”
“Then it’s a good thing I’m not trying to take it. Legitimacy is overrated. How is your family?”
“Well, I’m a grandfather again, for one.”
“Pity it’s not someone to pass on the Miles name. You aren’t perchance going to visit the boy anytime soon?”
“I never said it was a boy. Which leads me to assume you’d like me to take a message to my daughter.”
“Arthur never said it was a boy either, which leads me to assume your estimation of my intelligence isn’t as far under as it used to be.”
“Arthur. Arthur Darling?”
“-his last name is Darling? No wonder he never stopped me calling him that.”
Miles sighs, which renders itself through the phone as a static hiss, swelling at the start and tapering off just as Eames sees fit to snicker.
“Mr. Eames,” Miles says, in the same tone of voice Eames first heard of him, back when the world of shared dreaming was promise and hope. “You don’t need my reconnaissance to take this job. I can’t understand why you want it.”
“Well, I haven’t played the field in over a bloody year, I’d like to know the topography.”
“And I,” Miles says, “don’t expect I’ll see you on that field until Fiddler’s Green.”
It should shock Eames. It does shock Eames. It still shocks him more than it should, which is deeply enough that he almost trips over the hotel phone cord. “You can’t retire from dreams.”
“Contrary to popular belief, Mr. Eames, I don’t have to wait until I’m dead to sleep.”
“I mean you, specifically. You can’t retire from something you created.”
“I certainly can. Even Prometheus got his mountain resort in the end.”
“How do you sleep?”
“With eagles pecking out my liver, Mr. Eames, and the help of a very good chemist.”
Eames groans, sits on the edge of the bed, and unwinds a curl from the phone cord. “As myth arcs go that’s a rather sordid one.”
“And yet I choose it willingly, Mr. Eames, which is more than I can say for the rest of you.”
The silence that follows is awkward and, Eames thinks, entirely justified by the fact that he is, for once in his life, thoroughly dumbstruck. He imagines Miles is gloating, and can call that picture up acutely in his mind, but it still feels incorrect, like a forge the moment the mark spots it.
“I will pass along your concern and congratulations to my daughter, when I visit her in America next week,” Miles says, with abject finality. “I would say you might reach her faster through Dom, but I might well be lying. My daughter has, perhaps, seen the error of her father’s ways. I should wish you and Dom well, wherever it is you’re going, but there’s no sense in making wishes you would rather not come true. Good day, Mr. Eames. And you still owe me a paper.”
“I was undercover.”
“That’s no excuse.”
-
Something is very wrong with Dominic Cobb.
Eames can’t remember what his first clue was, or should have been, nor can he remember the second or the third or if there even should be a third. But by the time the cavalry charges into their Johannesburg bank heist wearing dilapidated and partially shredded uniforms of the Confederate States of America, he knows that’s the last clue he needs.
The mark, who is now wearing a glittering evening dress of approximately the same cut and color as Jessica Rabbit’s, takes one look at the ostensible lawmen and gapes, as cartoonish as her clothing. “I’m dreaming,” she says, “I must be dreaming,” and if the post-cavalry arrival of a swarm of keystone cops and Marcel Marceau (who promptly meets his end at the hands of the man with the golden gun) weren’t enough to do it, that tight little remark sets the dream collapsing right there.
“Well, that’s buggered,” Eames says, dropping character and looking over his shoulder just in time to not be hit by a falling gold brick. “One Architectural failure after anot-Cobb?”
The John Dillinger look does not suit Cobb at all. Neither does the horrified, somewhat green cast to his face, or the tremor in his hands. “I don’t know,” he says, a quiet hiss, his voice somehow darting between the hail of glass and rubble, “I really don’t know-”
Back in front of the vault, all Arthur says is, “Shit,” before calmly shooting himself in the head and disappearing. The mark’s gone, that must be why, and Eames’ USP has just turned into something garish with a plastic orange tip. Eames tries to recast it, shift it, but the trigger is presumably still plastic even after the cut crystal chandelier falls and lobs off Eames’ right hand at just under the elbow.
Well, if he can’t quite articulate the words Cobb, kill me now, you daft prick, he’s sure the resounding scream will get Cobb’s attention.
It does, blessedly.
Unfortunately, all Cobb has is an ice pick.
Eames’ eyes snap open on whiteness and cold, and then his shoulder and cheek hit the carpet. It’s a surprisingly hard carpet, for a decent hotel. He curses, wrings out his hands and staggers to his knees.
Arthur is standing over him, the mark crushed to his side in what must be the most perversely relaxed embrace Eames has ever seen. This is because Arthur is supporting said mark by the incapacitating towel over her jaw with one hand, and shoving Cobb out of bed with the other. The cannula of the PASIV is still dangling out of the mark’s hand, and Arthur’s is the same. It reminds Eames to see to his own, staunch it first and make sure the wound is clean. If Cobb’s contracted something-
Cobb’s body hits the floor. That’s all the assurance Arthur needs, apparently. “Do we have a Plan B?” he asks, while Cobb is still down on the floor. “No? Then I do. Split up, rendezvous in Cape Town in two days, and figure out what to tell Hoffman.”
“No,” Cobb says, with more emphasis than it probably needs. “No, we still have thirty six hours before the deadline. We’ll try again tomorrow.”
“We can’t come up with a new dream in a day.”
“Yes, we can. I can.”
“Like you just did?” Eames has gotten his hand un-punctured and stood up now, taking the mark out of Arthur’s hand and hefting her up a little more gracefully. “What was that?”
“I said I don’t know, and I meant I don’t know, and it’s not going to happen again.” Cobb also stands up, and gets himself disconnected, a good deal more cavalierly than Eames has seen him do before.
“Is it,” Eames says-and Arthur too, apparently, in staggered unison.
Eames looks at Arthur, expecting him to look back, at least be amused. He doesn’t. Arthur just goes on, “If you say we go ahead with it, we go ahead with it. I just think you shouldn’t say so.”
“Silly Arthur, he doesn’t pay you to think.”
Arthur grabs Eames by the neck, over the mark’s unconscious body.
The grip is stinging, warning, strong, and entirely unexpected. Not unwelcome, though, except in the sense that it’s cutting off Eames’ air to the point where if he decides to stand here and smirk instead of break free he’ll be as asleep as the mark in about a minute. But a minute is a minute, and Eames decides to smile.
“Cobb,” Arthur says, even though he’s looking Eames in the eyes, god damn it, this again, “I won’t lie and say I wouldn’t mind abandoning this job, as long as it means I will never have to work with Mr. Eames ever again.”
Again. Again, as if Eames is a child out of earshot, never mind that he’s so close to Arthur’s eyes he can see his reflection in them, blackened in the center like a bullet wound.
Eames reaches up both his hands to Arthur’s wrist, and threatens to snap it.
Predictably, Cobb comes between them, puts his hands on Arthur’s chest and Eames’ knuckles and shoves, once, gently, the way he probably breaks up fights between his own children. Damned if that doesn’t make Eames want to throttle Cobb as well. But Arthur lets him go, so Eames lets off him, and there’s a bloody wave of peacemaking to rival the damned Middle East, complete with dubiously unconscious fourth parties.
“We’re going ahead with it,” Cobb says. “Eames, I’m sure you can wrangle a second date. Start writing her a note about why you couldn’t stay, leave a number, we’ll imply you were a gentleman and just brought her back to her room. Meet her for dinner tomorrow, same place.”
“As long as we’re not going back to the Gold Rush, I’m perfectly fine with that.” Eames smiles, raises his eyebrows at Arthur. “And I don’t mind working with you,” he adds, and isn’t sure whether that’s a lie, but that doesn’t matter to Arthur, does it?
-
“-no, I already cancelled the flight. ... It’ll be covered when he pays us, I’m taking the flak for this one. -Because it’s my fault, Mal. Got a better reason? ... No, I can’t, not now. In this to the end, all right? Just like with us. You could have come, you know. -I know. No, no, Mal, this is real-no, I mean real-not just important-Mal, we’ll talk about this when I come home, okay? ... Day after tomorrow, just one stopover in Frankfurt. ... No, the one to London was full. ... No, Mal, it doesn’t-Mal it doesn’t work that way, we’re not-I’m telling you we’re not-Mal, you have to believe me, I-Mal-Mal, we can’t talk about this here, I have to build a new dream for tomorrow-no, we’re not. We’re not. Come on, Mal, I promise, say it with me. We’re not. ... ... All right. Are the kids asleep? ... Good. Good, you should sleep too. ... I know. I know, Mal, I know. I love you. I love you so much.”
God damn, but this warehouse echoes. Even the snap of Cobb shutting his cell phone seems to have it out for Eames’ ears.
“It’s a wonder anyone can sleep, listening to that,” he says, because emotional sensitivity really isn’t his strong suit tonight.
“I need your PASIV.” Well, it looks like Cobb’s not one to dwell any more. “Give me twenty minutes, I’ll freeform from there. You don’t need to know the layout, I’ll keep it simpler this time. No bank. We’ll bring her back to your place or something.”
Eames nods, won’t ask. “PASIV’s on the chaise where I left it. Arthur has yours?”
“His,” Cobb corrects, “and yeah. I think he’s running something in the back.”
There’s not much more to be said, really, if Cobb’s not talking, so Eames just lays things out, cleans his hand, plugs him in and sets the timer. Beyond that, it’s Eames, two stiffs, and a workshop.
Twenty minutes always seems like so much more to kill when you actually have to live all of it. So once Cobb is sprawled on a cot and, presumably, being more competent despite the somewhat obvious stressors in his life, Eames goes into the back room-the converted office of this abandoned garage-and checks on Arthur.
The timer on Arthur’s PASIV is set for over fifty minutes, which means he probably set it initially for an hour. The same way Eames has never gotten a proper look at Arthur’s gun, he’s never gotten a proper look at Arthur asleep and unguarded, and he thinks the revelations would be much the same. Arthur is asleep in the office’s leather computer chair, tilted back on its bearings with his toes just lightly touching the ground. He’s still wearing the suit from this evening, but undone just as Eames expects (and, perversely, remembers): jacket, waistcoat, and tie off, suspenders on, shirtsleeves up and collar down two notches. If Eames leans in close, he can confirm that he did know the correct path of the hair on Arthur’s chest, can see it just faintly beneath his undershirt.
Eames leans over him, supports himself on the back of the chair, hands on either side of Arthur’s pretty head. He looks at him upside-down like a signature to forge. He follows the length of Arthur’s chest, his arm, the IV where it slips between his fingers and winds into the PASIV case with all the others.
It is a very deliberate decision on Eames’ part, to clean the back of his hand and hijack Arthur’s dream.
There is, apparently, a non-Euclidian shooting range in Arthur’s head.
In fact, when Eames arrives, the bullets are coming from above and behind him, so he turns and reorients himself so that gravity is actually where his feet belong. All of the surfaces are the sort of plastic white that blood bounces on, but not all of them are flat, and parts of the floor curve up into columns and Escherian staircases. But all over, it’s white and gleaming, a floor for shadows but no reflections. Eames, in his somewhat cheerful clothes, stands out like the bulls-eye he’s probably meant to be.
Arthur, he thinks, and wanders up (or down) the staircases, from one relative plane to the next, following the curve and then the vertex of the floor as the angle decides, abruptly, to shift gravity to Eames’ front. Another hail of bullets passes him-not aimed for him or even on his plane, evidently, as they emerge from one portal between pillars, fire into another, and then re-emerge somewhere over Eames’ head on a trajectory along the third axis, the one that places gravity to Eames’ right.
Eames would be nauseated if he wasn’t fascinated.
He can’t find Arthur just yet-good luck finding the source of those bullets, if those portals obey any logic at all-but the projections begin to reveal themselves. They all seem to be having the same gravitational issues as Eames. At the start, they’re all anonymous soldiers in black drab, slow-moving and armed. Shots are fired, volleys are exchanged, Eames has to take cover at least once. The projections pick up speed and efficiency, sometimes shooting first, sometimes taking advantage of the cover and the rules of this game. By the time Eames notices their armaments becoming increasingly deadly-the first grenade goes off somewhere to Eames’ relative wall and gravitational left-he also finds Arthur, perched at the top, which thereafter becomes the bottom, of a staircase spread sideways overhead.
Arthur isn’t camouflaged, which defies Eames’ expectations until it occurs to him that Arthur isn’t playing this game to win.
He isn’t, is he.
Very well. Eames will make it just as hard as Arthur could possibly want.
He insinuates his own subconscious into the projections. They take proper cover, shoot first, team up. Eames may not have the layout of Arthur’s mind but he finds he doesn’t need it, lets his projections overrun all six planes of gravity until Arthur has to abuse the portals, reload his guns, bend his own rules. He starts firing between staircases, even loops himself under one like a pendulum so he can strafe along the targets beneath him.
Eames catches him smiling, somewhere, upside-down without anything but the corners of his jaw coming loose.
The fallen projections, however numerous, do not leave anything behind, not a corpse, not a smell, not a stain. Arthur doesn’t trip over them, rushing down and up the stairs, up the columns, gun out and eyes undauntedly forward. Somehow, Eames knows where the portal he’s racing toward leads, what floor, what gravity-on impulse, he faces it, and instead of doing something so trite as sneaking up on Arthur, he lets Arthur run right up to him.
“Well that’s expectedly unoriginal,” he says, once Arthur passes between the columns.
Arthur damn near shoots Eames, and that is a damn near probably because Eames is stationary and unarmed and the recent projections are, were, neither of these things. He stalls. The bullets, elsewhere, also cease to fly. He is about an arm’s length away from Eames, point-blank range, and Eames decides that, in Arthur’s state that is far too close.
“Easy, pet.” He backs off, just a touch, finds a column to rest his palm on. “Don’t want to deprive yourself of a perfectly good subconscious, do you?”
Arthur glowers. “You’re not here.”
“What, you dream about me when I’m not? I’m positively touched.”
This time, Arthur does shoot him.
Eames dodges behind that pillar, barely, or at least has the luxury of thinking he’s dodged until his pant leg tears and so does the skin beneath it. Just over his knee, the cloth and the flesh swell a hot slow red. Bullet-scrape. He groans. God, Arthur’s good.
“Yeah,” Arthur says. It rolls off him, as if the voice obeys all six laws of gravity here too. “I dream about you. One knee after the other. Left elbow, then right. Hips. Collarbones. Left hand. And then, if I care, I put one right between your eyes.”
Eames should not want this. Eames should not want a lot of things. “How often do you care?”
Arthur’s gun juts past the vertex of the column, and then Arthur with it, sideways all through. Oh, finally. It’s a Glock 17. Classic. But with only ten in the clip? Really, he’s selling himself short.
“Darling, I really am here, you know-”
“If you are you’re not welcome.” He stalks forward. The plane spins, Arthur coming at Eames from all angles-
“But not unwanted,” Eames says.
Before Arthur can shoot him again, Eames branches out, warps the dreamscape from the white complex into a lavish apartment with only one source of gravity, thank you. Arthur blinks at the change in lighting-a moment later, he’s refurnished it to one of his own familiar designs. Eames decides he respects Arthur’s decorative lifestyle, though really, everything is a bit square, and he should return the paintings to the fifteen different Twentieth-Century Art museums he’s appropriated them from. Eames is now taking cover behind a closet door instead of a pillar, and Arthur is glowering at him over the polished wood dining room table.
The closet is full of coats. Eames wonders where it leads. “Having a little trouble dreaming, aren’t you, pet.”
“That’s none of your business.”
“When’s the last time you came up with something new?” Eames comes out with his hands up as if to talk Arthur down, even if that’s the last thing in the world he wants. “It’s before you even met me, isn’t it. Before Cobb. Before you even had a machine of your own to play with. Do you play?”
Arthur is not lowering that gun.
Eames is close enough now to knock Arthur’s wrist out of the way and knows he’ll have to, soon, very soon. He leans in close, lets Arthur feel his breath. “Ever?”
Arthur is too competent to shoot. He gets in close and pistol-whips Eames in the jaw. It’s only after that, after the swell and crack race down the sinews of Eames’ neck, that Eames manages to grab Arthur’s wrist and wrest the gun out of the way. Fine, it’s out of the way, but it’s not out of Arthur’s hand, well that was dodgy at best, and now Arthur is in Eames’s space, shouldering him down and grabbing him by the chin right where it hurts.
“Fine,” he snarls. “You’re real, you’re here. But are you satisfied?”
Eames tells him truly, “Never, Darling.”
Once Eames manages to throw Arthur off-no small task, Eames knows damned well how strong that little blighter is but it never ceases to surprise him-Arthur hooks a leg behind Eames’ and trips him to the floor. Eames falls well, manages not to get his wind knocked out, and is in a prime position to kick both of his legs, heels together, into Arthur’s gut.
Arthur flies, his back crushing the glass of one of the framed paintings on the wall, which is revealed once Arthur falls away from it to be Roger Hilton’s Composition in Orange, Black, and Grey and really ought to be hanging where it belongs in the Tate. Eames could laugh if Arthur wasn’t springing to his feet and lunging at him again.
-and he still has the gun. Eames sees that when Arthur flips it around to hold it by the barrel. And Eames feels it when the grip connects, hard, this time not with Eames’ jaw but with his solar plexus.
It would take a very, very strong man not to fold like a ten-high no pair. Eames is only very strong. Just one very. God, there went all the air in his lungs.
There is no better way to lose it, he thinks.
Unless the better way is Arthur pouncing on him like a goddamned mountain lion, grabbing him by the hair and the belt and throwing him into the nearest bookshelf. Books topple, and open, and Eames can’t do that trick where he proves someone else is dreaming by opening a book he’s never read and finding the correct words because Arthur is slamming Eames’ head into the corner of the shelf, twice, three times, four. Eames barely manages to get his arms around Arthur’s torso, but does, and pummels Arthur’s jaw with the heel of his hand. It works, but he has to do it twice to get Arthur’s hand out of his hair.
There is definitely blood on the back of Eames’ skull. He should care more. He doesn’t, not when he needs to pin Arthur to the floor and pound his pretty face in, trap him knees-over-thighs and show him what a real physical advantage feels like. He slams Arthur’s wrist into the floor, three, four, five times just to be sure he lets go of the gun, then makes Arthur swat it away hard with the back of his hand. He gets as far as grabbing Arthur by the tie and readying that punch, and then when he lets it loose his knuckles don’t hit chin but collar. He can hear the bone crack, somewhere under Arthur’s shout. But before Eames can slam his fist down again Arthur twists under him, throws him off, gets his knee loped over Eames’ neck from the inside out. Eames would make a remark about how goddamned arousing the position and possibility are, except one terrifying scuffle later and Eames finds himself on his back (this is a much nicer carpet than earlier, he thinks, dazedly) with his neck crushed between Arthur’s calf and thigh.
The lights are starting to halo, and Arthur’s hair is more than a bit ruffled. Well, not to mention, his suit is tattered and his cuffs are bloody and the smirk dripping off his lips should be illegal. Eames appreciates it for long enough to concentrate, get his fists knotted together and pound them right into the base of Arthur’s spine. That buys him another moment to breathe, which he takes, and time to get away, which he doesn’t take, works his way onto his side so he can grab Arthur by the ankle. Arthur doesn’t expect to be flung like a hammer. This is probably why it works. And why it sends Arthur skidding on the knee of his suit right back into the cracked glass of his Roger Hilton.
Eames gets to his feet. It takes him a tenth of a second too long.
And that tenth of a second ends with Arthur body-checking him into the dining room table, and the table cracking down the center, rising on either side of them like a cage. Eames has his hands in Arthur’s hair, on Arthur’s thigh-Arthur has his left forearm braced over Eames’ neck, cutting off his air.
They breathe. Well, Arthur breathes. Eames tries.
Eames is not sure which one of them gets his fly open, though Eames knows he’s the one to undo Arthur’s because the pin of the belt punctures his thumb. He also knows that his hand is the first one around both of their cocks, because Arthur’s the one to cry out and arch down, the one to realign their legs as much as they can in the ruins of the table so he can grab on too. Arthur’s forearm never moves, never lets Eames up, he can feel the starch of his shirt thickening with sweat, feel the strain that ripples up Arthur’s bones to the one that’s clearly broken. But after that, it’s harder to know, harder to see or say clearly. One of them grinds. One of them tightens. One of them pulls their bodies even closer, buries Arthur’s face in the crook of Eames’ delightfully abused neck. Eames holds Arthur by the hair and bites down on his fractured collarbone, makes him scream, makes him hold out longer, makes him know-makes him surge, harden in their hands.
The table hadn’t fully broken. It does now, jolts them to the floor like a kick, when Eames starts fucking their tangled hands, when Arthur shoves him back down and sets them thrusting faster. Eames laughs-that might be the concussion-and Arthur groans, but damned if that isn’t music to Eames’ ears. He tightens his grip on Arthur’s hair, feels the gel start to stick to his palm, even as that same sweat just makes the jack of their other hands all the easier.
Eames knows Arthur’s body, now. He knows the shape of his cock, the pace of his breath, the kind of half-formed words he says when he wants to come and doesn’t want to beg. He knows the alignment of every muscle in Arthur’s right hand, the weight of his chest, the spread of his thighs, the source of every single hair, every vein, every nerve. He knows how close Arthur gets to the edge of his own control, how he clings to it like a cliff with a miles-long drop.
There’s still more. Eames is convinced that there will always be more.
He comes first, shuddering against Arthur’s hand, chest, cock-Eames twists Arthur’s neck so he can look Arthur in the eyes when he follows. If Arthur’s hands and hips hadn’t done it, his face would have. Eames will put that face on, those lips, those eyes, that wanting, every time he’s alone with a mirror in his mind.
It doesn’t feel done, but they lay still, tangled and soaked and as splintered as the table. Arthur lifts his forearm off Eames’ throat a bit later than Eames would have liked, but Eames unwinds his fist from Arthur’s hair and calls it all, inwardly, square. Arthur’s breath is heaving as if he, not Eames, was the one practically strangled into orgasm. Perhaps, for Arthur’s body, it’s the same.
When Eames can move his arms again, it’s to start trying to remove his shirt. His semen-slick fingers struggle through two buttons before he remembers this is a dream. It has to be; Arthur is helping him out of his clothes instead of shooting him in the head. It’s all very funny. And Arthur’s fingers are surprisingly clumsy like this. Eames laughs, settles into the wreckage, and spreads his palm on Arthur’s lower back. Arthur hisses in through his teeth. Eames can feel the heavy pulse of the bruises through Arthur’s suit.
“Yes,” Arthur says, quietly, as if admitting to a crime. For a moment Eames is annoyingly confused as to why, but then Arthur has gotten Eames’ shirt off-it tears on the shattered wood-and is speaking with his mouth pressed close to the tattoo on Eames’ left shoulder. “Yes. I stopped dreaming before I left the military. So did you.”
Eames laughs. It makes the red edges of his vision swell. “There’s a lot about me you know, isn’t there.”
“More than you’d like me to,” Arthur says.
“You are very good at your job, aren’t you, Darling.”
“I have to be.”
Were that some kind of resolution, Arthur would be smiling. That’s not the expression Eames feels where Arthur’s mouth rests on his skin. But Eames can duplicate it. And he will.
Arthur removes his jacket and shirts-Eames has to help with all three, and palms the increasingly evident broken collarbone before Arthur stands. He doesn’t help Eames, and by the time Eames gets to his feet, Arthur has already left the room, looking for something. Arthur’s search isn’t frantic, but determined, always looking at walls and behind doors and finding only the paintings he’d hung. Eames is about to make a crack about conjuring up some condoms when it dawns on him.
Eames builds Arthur a mirror. He hangs it, just a touch crooked, between an Escher and a Hockney.
Arthur fucks him into it.
-
Eames wakes up with a gentle abruptness, like he’s taken a step down a stair a decimeter too deep. He has a ridiculous headache, a fire in his lungs, a crust at the corner of his eyes, and a somewhat insistent erection.
This was, he thinks, one of his better ideas.
Arthur, though, is already out of the desk chair, disconnecting from the IV and bracing himself on the desk. Eames stands up, insinuates himself behind Arthur, touches his back and collar. “Better than relativity, isn’t it?” He wonders if Arthur’s stillness is a kind of invitation. “Actuality.”
Arthur had been hanging his head. His hair is disobliged to the laws of gravity by virtue of, in reality, still being gelled down pat, despite the sheen of sweat on his forehead. When he lifts, the gesture bares his throat, nestles him in along Eames’ neck. “It would be,” he agrees, following Eames’ meaning without offering more to it. “But we’ve got work to do.”
Eames groans against the nape of Arthur’s neck, nips the collarbone that by all rights should be in need of more attention than just his. “It’s a good thing I respect you,” he says, stepping aside. “Otherwise I would feel extremely insulted.”
“You should,” Arthur says.
“What, be insulted?”
“No. Respect me.”
He permits Arthur to leave him there, to just push off the desk and go. Eames takes a moment to unwind from the PASIV, and sits in Arthur’s chair, appropriating his residual warmth.
-
“Did Hoffman finally pay you?”
Eames tells him, “Haven’t checked this morning,” and continues to filch the hotel’s Internet. He brings up his bank notices, logs in. “Yes, but it hasn’t cleared.”
“Check again tomorrow,” Arthur says. In the background on his side of the line, a raucous cheer goes up, and Eames misses anything else Arthur might just have said.
“What was that?”
“I said it’s cleared Stateside, shouldn’t be more than a day longer for you.”
“Christ, man, where are you?”
“Ascot.”
“You’re at Ascot when I’m in bloody Morocco? Who won?”
“Hurdy-Gurdy. My share just tripled.”
Eames groans. “Just you wait, Arthur Darling.”
“What, did you have money on Lady MacDuff?”
“Not enough to count.” He smiles, despite himself and the equatorial heat. “I’ll make it back.”
“You always do.”
It would be a silence that hangs between them, save for the cheering crowds and ebullient announcers on Arthur’s side of the line, and the bustling crowds beneath Eames’s second-storey hotel room. Eames watches one in the marked absence of the other, and reels the conversation in.
“Cobb’s square?”
“Yeah, glad his share came through today. They jacked up the price on his Anniversary suite this year. And you?”
“Another job in the works here. I’ll be middling around Africa for a while, I’m not wanted at all on this continent.”
“I was about to say.”
Eames leers into the mouthpiece of his phone, and asks if Arthur was about to say something else.
“Yes,” Arthur says. “I’ll be in touch, Mr. Eames.”
-
---
-
.
Back to Part 1...
.
-
“I have my sources. Thanks for confirming that it is the correct number. I’d hate to offer this job to anyone else.”
“Well,” Eames says, drumming his fingers in an arpeggio on the receiver, “should I be honored, or enquire as to the current extradition policies?”
“You’re not wanted in South Africa.”
“My dear Arthur, no British man is wanted in South Africa.”
Arthur laughs, and that can’t just be a trick of the hotel phone, not even in Calcutta. There’s a joke to be made about outsourcing but Eames can’t quite put it together. Eames wonders where Arthur is calling from. “I think they’d make an exception for the English Men’s National Football Team.”
“I doubt this job involves wearing a kit.”
“You’ll have to accept it to find out.”
It is easy for Eames to laugh, for him to put on an air of amicability. Talking to Arthur when Arthur isn’t here should really be much easier than this. “Who’s in?”
“Three. You, me, and Dom.”
“Pity. Is Mal having trouble with parasites again?”
“They had their second child last year, and no, she’s not pregnant. Just not coming. Which is, again, why we’re asking you.”
The prospect of working with extractors who behave professionally and don’t get Eames landed in prison in Thailand does have a rather distinct appeal. The prospect of working with an Architect like Dom again, in particular, has an appeal that’s even rational, reliable. And Arthur-
Well. That just makes things interesting.
“You’ll forgive me, darling, but I’m going to make one phone call before I accept.”
“Let’s hope that’s the only habit you acquired in prison.”
“Give me a way to reach you.”
“Try,” Arthur says, and hangs up.
It takes a bit of forwarding, since the directory on Eames’ cell phone is somewhere in the South China Sea with, of course, the rest of his cell phone, and Eames has no memory for numbers. Still, with some wrangling and a distinct lack of Internet he manages to find Miles at a Paris area code, in his office (and then his classroom) at the École Spéciale d’Architecture.
“You had better have a good excuse, Mr. Eames.”
“My god, have we gone back in time? Quick, Miles, what year is it?”
“Some of us can go back, you know,” he says, and however refreshing it is to hear Estuary English, Eames had hoped for a little more fondness. Perhaps that doesn’t translate well across continents. “Though I do believe, for you, the way is shut.”
“Then it’s a good thing I’m not trying to take it. Legitimacy is overrated. How is your family?”
“Well, I’m a grandfather again, for one.”
“Pity it’s not someone to pass on the Miles name. You aren’t perchance going to visit the boy anytime soon?”
“I never said it was a boy. Which leads me to assume you’d like me to take a message to my daughter.”
“Arthur never said it was a boy either, which leads me to assume your estimation of my intelligence isn’t as far under as it used to be.”
“Arthur. Arthur Darling?”
“-his last name is Darling? No wonder he never stopped me calling him that.”
Miles sighs, which renders itself through the phone as a static hiss, swelling at the start and tapering off just as Eames sees fit to snicker.
“Mr. Eames,” Miles says, in the same tone of voice Eames first heard of him, back when the world of shared dreaming was promise and hope. “You don’t need my reconnaissance to take this job. I can’t understand why you want it.”
“Well, I haven’t played the field in over a bloody year, I’d like to know the topography.”
“And I,” Miles says, “don’t expect I’ll see you on that field until Fiddler’s Green.”
It should shock Eames. It does shock Eames. It still shocks him more than it should, which is deeply enough that he almost trips over the hotel phone cord. “You can’t retire from dreams.”
“Contrary to popular belief, Mr. Eames, I don’t have to wait until I’m dead to sleep.”
“I mean you, specifically. You can’t retire from something you created.”
“I certainly can. Even Prometheus got his mountain resort in the end.”
“How do you sleep?”
“With eagles pecking out my liver, Mr. Eames, and the help of a very good chemist.”
Eames groans, sits on the edge of the bed, and unwinds a curl from the phone cord. “As myth arcs go that’s a rather sordid one.”
“And yet I choose it willingly, Mr. Eames, which is more than I can say for the rest of you.”
The silence that follows is awkward and, Eames thinks, entirely justified by the fact that he is, for once in his life, thoroughly dumbstruck. He imagines Miles is gloating, and can call that picture up acutely in his mind, but it still feels incorrect, like a forge the moment the mark spots it.
“I will pass along your concern and congratulations to my daughter, when I visit her in America next week,” Miles says, with abject finality. “I would say you might reach her faster through Dom, but I might well be lying. My daughter has, perhaps, seen the error of her father’s ways. I should wish you and Dom well, wherever it is you’re going, but there’s no sense in making wishes you would rather not come true. Good day, Mr. Eames. And you still owe me a paper.”
“I was undercover.”
“That’s no excuse.”
-
Something is very wrong with Dominic Cobb.
Eames can’t remember what his first clue was, or should have been, nor can he remember the second or the third or if there even should be a third. But by the time the cavalry charges into their Johannesburg bank heist wearing dilapidated and partially shredded uniforms of the Confederate States of America, he knows that’s the last clue he needs.
The mark, who is now wearing a glittering evening dress of approximately the same cut and color as Jessica Rabbit’s, takes one look at the ostensible lawmen and gapes, as cartoonish as her clothing. “I’m dreaming,” she says, “I must be dreaming,” and if the post-cavalry arrival of a swarm of keystone cops and Marcel Marceau (who promptly meets his end at the hands of the man with the golden gun) weren’t enough to do it, that tight little remark sets the dream collapsing right there.
“Well, that’s buggered,” Eames says, dropping character and looking over his shoulder just in time to not be hit by a falling gold brick. “One Architectural failure after anot-Cobb?”
The John Dillinger look does not suit Cobb at all. Neither does the horrified, somewhat green cast to his face, or the tremor in his hands. “I don’t know,” he says, a quiet hiss, his voice somehow darting between the hail of glass and rubble, “I really don’t know-”
Back in front of the vault, all Arthur says is, “Shit,” before calmly shooting himself in the head and disappearing. The mark’s gone, that must be why, and Eames’ USP has just turned into something garish with a plastic orange tip. Eames tries to recast it, shift it, but the trigger is presumably still plastic even after the cut crystal chandelier falls and lobs off Eames’ right hand at just under the elbow.
Well, if he can’t quite articulate the words Cobb, kill me now, you daft prick, he’s sure the resounding scream will get Cobb’s attention.
It does, blessedly.
Unfortunately, all Cobb has is an ice pick.
Eames’ eyes snap open on whiteness and cold, and then his shoulder and cheek hit the carpet. It’s a surprisingly hard carpet, for a decent hotel. He curses, wrings out his hands and staggers to his knees.
Arthur is standing over him, the mark crushed to his side in what must be the most perversely relaxed embrace Eames has ever seen. This is because Arthur is supporting said mark by the incapacitating towel over her jaw with one hand, and shoving Cobb out of bed with the other. The cannula of the PASIV is still dangling out of the mark’s hand, and Arthur’s is the same. It reminds Eames to see to his own, staunch it first and make sure the wound is clean. If Cobb’s contracted something-
Cobb’s body hits the floor. That’s all the assurance Arthur needs, apparently. “Do we have a Plan B?” he asks, while Cobb is still down on the floor. “No? Then I do. Split up, rendezvous in Cape Town in two days, and figure out what to tell Hoffman.”
“No,” Cobb says, with more emphasis than it probably needs. “No, we still have thirty six hours before the deadline. We’ll try again tomorrow.”
“We can’t come up with a new dream in a day.”
“Yes, we can. I can.”
“Like you just did?” Eames has gotten his hand un-punctured and stood up now, taking the mark out of Arthur’s hand and hefting her up a little more gracefully. “What was that?”
“I said I don’t know, and I meant I don’t know, and it’s not going to happen again.” Cobb also stands up, and gets himself disconnected, a good deal more cavalierly than Eames has seen him do before.
“Is it,” Eames says-and Arthur too, apparently, in staggered unison.
Eames looks at Arthur, expecting him to look back, at least be amused. He doesn’t. Arthur just goes on, “If you say we go ahead with it, we go ahead with it. I just think you shouldn’t say so.”
“Silly Arthur, he doesn’t pay you to think.”
Arthur grabs Eames by the neck, over the mark’s unconscious body.
The grip is stinging, warning, strong, and entirely unexpected. Not unwelcome, though, except in the sense that it’s cutting off Eames’ air to the point where if he decides to stand here and smirk instead of break free he’ll be as asleep as the mark in about a minute. But a minute is a minute, and Eames decides to smile.
“Cobb,” Arthur says, even though he’s looking Eames in the eyes, god damn it, this again, “I won’t lie and say I wouldn’t mind abandoning this job, as long as it means I will never have to work with Mr. Eames ever again.”
Again. Again, as if Eames is a child out of earshot, never mind that he’s so close to Arthur’s eyes he can see his reflection in them, blackened in the center like a bullet wound.
Eames reaches up both his hands to Arthur’s wrist, and threatens to snap it.
Predictably, Cobb comes between them, puts his hands on Arthur’s chest and Eames’ knuckles and shoves, once, gently, the way he probably breaks up fights between his own children. Damned if that doesn’t make Eames want to throttle Cobb as well. But Arthur lets him go, so Eames lets off him, and there’s a bloody wave of peacemaking to rival the damned Middle East, complete with dubiously unconscious fourth parties.
“We’re going ahead with it,” Cobb says. “Eames, I’m sure you can wrangle a second date. Start writing her a note about why you couldn’t stay, leave a number, we’ll imply you were a gentleman and just brought her back to her room. Meet her for dinner tomorrow, same place.”
“As long as we’re not going back to the Gold Rush, I’m perfectly fine with that.” Eames smiles, raises his eyebrows at Arthur. “And I don’t mind working with you,” he adds, and isn’t sure whether that’s a lie, but that doesn’t matter to Arthur, does it?
-
“-no, I already cancelled the flight. ... It’ll be covered when he pays us, I’m taking the flak for this one. -Because it’s my fault, Mal. Got a better reason? ... No, I can’t, not now. In this to the end, all right? Just like with us. You could have come, you know. -I know. No, no, Mal, this is real-no, I mean real-not just important-Mal, we’ll talk about this when I come home, okay? ... Day after tomorrow, just one stopover in Frankfurt. ... No, the one to London was full. ... No, Mal, it doesn’t-Mal it doesn’t work that way, we’re not-I’m telling you we’re not-Mal, you have to believe me, I-Mal-Mal, we can’t talk about this here, I have to build a new dream for tomorrow-no, we’re not. We’re not. Come on, Mal, I promise, say it with me. We’re not. ... ... All right. Are the kids asleep? ... Good. Good, you should sleep too. ... I know. I know, Mal, I know. I love you. I love you so much.”
God damn, but this warehouse echoes. Even the snap of Cobb shutting his cell phone seems to have it out for Eames’ ears.
“It’s a wonder anyone can sleep, listening to that,” he says, because emotional sensitivity really isn’t his strong suit tonight.
“I need your PASIV.” Well, it looks like Cobb’s not one to dwell any more. “Give me twenty minutes, I’ll freeform from there. You don’t need to know the layout, I’ll keep it simpler this time. No bank. We’ll bring her back to your place or something.”
Eames nods, won’t ask. “PASIV’s on the chaise where I left it. Arthur has yours?”
“His,” Cobb corrects, “and yeah. I think he’s running something in the back.”
There’s not much more to be said, really, if Cobb’s not talking, so Eames just lays things out, cleans his hand, plugs him in and sets the timer. Beyond that, it’s Eames, two stiffs, and a workshop.
Twenty minutes always seems like so much more to kill when you actually have to live all of it. So once Cobb is sprawled on a cot and, presumably, being more competent despite the somewhat obvious stressors in his life, Eames goes into the back room-the converted office of this abandoned garage-and checks on Arthur.
The timer on Arthur’s PASIV is set for over fifty minutes, which means he probably set it initially for an hour. The same way Eames has never gotten a proper look at Arthur’s gun, he’s never gotten a proper look at Arthur asleep and unguarded, and he thinks the revelations would be much the same. Arthur is asleep in the office’s leather computer chair, tilted back on its bearings with his toes just lightly touching the ground. He’s still wearing the suit from this evening, but undone just as Eames expects (and, perversely, remembers): jacket, waistcoat, and tie off, suspenders on, shirtsleeves up and collar down two notches. If Eames leans in close, he can confirm that he did know the correct path of the hair on Arthur’s chest, can see it just faintly beneath his undershirt.
Eames leans over him, supports himself on the back of the chair, hands on either side of Arthur’s pretty head. He looks at him upside-down like a signature to forge. He follows the length of Arthur’s chest, his arm, the IV where it slips between his fingers and winds into the PASIV case with all the others.
It is a very deliberate decision on Eames’ part, to clean the back of his hand and hijack Arthur’s dream.
There is, apparently, a non-Euclidian shooting range in Arthur’s head.
In fact, when Eames arrives, the bullets are coming from above and behind him, so he turns and reorients himself so that gravity is actually where his feet belong. All of the surfaces are the sort of plastic white that blood bounces on, but not all of them are flat, and parts of the floor curve up into columns and Escherian staircases. But all over, it’s white and gleaming, a floor for shadows but no reflections. Eames, in his somewhat cheerful clothes, stands out like the bulls-eye he’s probably meant to be.
Arthur, he thinks, and wanders up (or down) the staircases, from one relative plane to the next, following the curve and then the vertex of the floor as the angle decides, abruptly, to shift gravity to Eames’ front. Another hail of bullets passes him-not aimed for him or even on his plane, evidently, as they emerge from one portal between pillars, fire into another, and then re-emerge somewhere over Eames’ head on a trajectory along the third axis, the one that places gravity to Eames’ right.
Eames would be nauseated if he wasn’t fascinated.
He can’t find Arthur just yet-good luck finding the source of those bullets, if those portals obey any logic at all-but the projections begin to reveal themselves. They all seem to be having the same gravitational issues as Eames. At the start, they’re all anonymous soldiers in black drab, slow-moving and armed. Shots are fired, volleys are exchanged, Eames has to take cover at least once. The projections pick up speed and efficiency, sometimes shooting first, sometimes taking advantage of the cover and the rules of this game. By the time Eames notices their armaments becoming increasingly deadly-the first grenade goes off somewhere to Eames’ relative wall and gravitational left-he also finds Arthur, perched at the top, which thereafter becomes the bottom, of a staircase spread sideways overhead.
Arthur isn’t camouflaged, which defies Eames’ expectations until it occurs to him that Arthur isn’t playing this game to win.
He isn’t, is he.
Very well. Eames will make it just as hard as Arthur could possibly want.
He insinuates his own subconscious into the projections. They take proper cover, shoot first, team up. Eames may not have the layout of Arthur’s mind but he finds he doesn’t need it, lets his projections overrun all six planes of gravity until Arthur has to abuse the portals, reload his guns, bend his own rules. He starts firing between staircases, even loops himself under one like a pendulum so he can strafe along the targets beneath him.
Eames catches him smiling, somewhere, upside-down without anything but the corners of his jaw coming loose.
The fallen projections, however numerous, do not leave anything behind, not a corpse, not a smell, not a stain. Arthur doesn’t trip over them, rushing down and up the stairs, up the columns, gun out and eyes undauntedly forward. Somehow, Eames knows where the portal he’s racing toward leads, what floor, what gravity-on impulse, he faces it, and instead of doing something so trite as sneaking up on Arthur, he lets Arthur run right up to him.
“Well that’s expectedly unoriginal,” he says, once Arthur passes between the columns.
Arthur damn near shoots Eames, and that is a damn near probably because Eames is stationary and unarmed and the recent projections are, were, neither of these things. He stalls. The bullets, elsewhere, also cease to fly. He is about an arm’s length away from Eames, point-blank range, and Eames decides that, in Arthur’s state that is far too close.
“Easy, pet.” He backs off, just a touch, finds a column to rest his palm on. “Don’t want to deprive yourself of a perfectly good subconscious, do you?”
Arthur glowers. “You’re not here.”
“What, you dream about me when I’m not? I’m positively touched.”
This time, Arthur does shoot him.
Eames dodges behind that pillar, barely, or at least has the luxury of thinking he’s dodged until his pant leg tears and so does the skin beneath it. Just over his knee, the cloth and the flesh swell a hot slow red. Bullet-scrape. He groans. God, Arthur’s good.
“Yeah,” Arthur says. It rolls off him, as if the voice obeys all six laws of gravity here too. “I dream about you. One knee after the other. Left elbow, then right. Hips. Collarbones. Left hand. And then, if I care, I put one right between your eyes.”
Eames should not want this. Eames should not want a lot of things. “How often do you care?”
Arthur’s gun juts past the vertex of the column, and then Arthur with it, sideways all through. Oh, finally. It’s a Glock 17. Classic. But with only ten in the clip? Really, he’s selling himself short.
“Darling, I really am here, you know-”
“If you are you’re not welcome.” He stalks forward. The plane spins, Arthur coming at Eames from all angles-
“But not unwanted,” Eames says.
Before Arthur can shoot him again, Eames branches out, warps the dreamscape from the white complex into a lavish apartment with only one source of gravity, thank you. Arthur blinks at the change in lighting-a moment later, he’s refurnished it to one of his own familiar designs. Eames decides he respects Arthur’s decorative lifestyle, though really, everything is a bit square, and he should return the paintings to the fifteen different Twentieth-Century Art museums he’s appropriated them from. Eames is now taking cover behind a closet door instead of a pillar, and Arthur is glowering at him over the polished wood dining room table.
The closet is full of coats. Eames wonders where it leads. “Having a little trouble dreaming, aren’t you, pet.”
“That’s none of your business.”
“When’s the last time you came up with something new?” Eames comes out with his hands up as if to talk Arthur down, even if that’s the last thing in the world he wants. “It’s before you even met me, isn’t it. Before Cobb. Before you even had a machine of your own to play with. Do you play?”
Arthur is not lowering that gun.
Eames is close enough now to knock Arthur’s wrist out of the way and knows he’ll have to, soon, very soon. He leans in close, lets Arthur feel his breath. “Ever?”
Arthur is too competent to shoot. He gets in close and pistol-whips Eames in the jaw. It’s only after that, after the swell and crack race down the sinews of Eames’ neck, that Eames manages to grab Arthur’s wrist and wrest the gun out of the way. Fine, it’s out of the way, but it’s not out of Arthur’s hand, well that was dodgy at best, and now Arthur is in Eames’s space, shouldering him down and grabbing him by the chin right where it hurts.
“Fine,” he snarls. “You’re real, you’re here. But are you satisfied?”
Eames tells him truly, “Never, Darling.”
Once Eames manages to throw Arthur off-no small task, Eames knows damned well how strong that little blighter is but it never ceases to surprise him-Arthur hooks a leg behind Eames’ and trips him to the floor. Eames falls well, manages not to get his wind knocked out, and is in a prime position to kick both of his legs, heels together, into Arthur’s gut.
Arthur flies, his back crushing the glass of one of the framed paintings on the wall, which is revealed once Arthur falls away from it to be Roger Hilton’s Composition in Orange, Black, and Grey and really ought to be hanging where it belongs in the Tate. Eames could laugh if Arthur wasn’t springing to his feet and lunging at him again.
-and he still has the gun. Eames sees that when Arthur flips it around to hold it by the barrel. And Eames feels it when the grip connects, hard, this time not with Eames’ jaw but with his solar plexus.
It would take a very, very strong man not to fold like a ten-high no pair. Eames is only very strong. Just one very. God, there went all the air in his lungs.
There is no better way to lose it, he thinks.
Unless the better way is Arthur pouncing on him like a goddamned mountain lion, grabbing him by the hair and the belt and throwing him into the nearest bookshelf. Books topple, and open, and Eames can’t do that trick where he proves someone else is dreaming by opening a book he’s never read and finding the correct words because Arthur is slamming Eames’ head into the corner of the shelf, twice, three times, four. Eames barely manages to get his arms around Arthur’s torso, but does, and pummels Arthur’s jaw with the heel of his hand. It works, but he has to do it twice to get Arthur’s hand out of his hair.
There is definitely blood on the back of Eames’ skull. He should care more. He doesn’t, not when he needs to pin Arthur to the floor and pound his pretty face in, trap him knees-over-thighs and show him what a real physical advantage feels like. He slams Arthur’s wrist into the floor, three, four, five times just to be sure he lets go of the gun, then makes Arthur swat it away hard with the back of his hand. He gets as far as grabbing Arthur by the tie and readying that punch, and then when he lets it loose his knuckles don’t hit chin but collar. He can hear the bone crack, somewhere under Arthur’s shout. But before Eames can slam his fist down again Arthur twists under him, throws him off, gets his knee loped over Eames’ neck from the inside out. Eames would make a remark about how goddamned arousing the position and possibility are, except one terrifying scuffle later and Eames finds himself on his back (this is a much nicer carpet than earlier, he thinks, dazedly) with his neck crushed between Arthur’s calf and thigh.
The lights are starting to halo, and Arthur’s hair is more than a bit ruffled. Well, not to mention, his suit is tattered and his cuffs are bloody and the smirk dripping off his lips should be illegal. Eames appreciates it for long enough to concentrate, get his fists knotted together and pound them right into the base of Arthur’s spine. That buys him another moment to breathe, which he takes, and time to get away, which he doesn’t take, works his way onto his side so he can grab Arthur by the ankle. Arthur doesn’t expect to be flung like a hammer. This is probably why it works. And why it sends Arthur skidding on the knee of his suit right back into the cracked glass of his Roger Hilton.
Eames gets to his feet. It takes him a tenth of a second too long.
And that tenth of a second ends with Arthur body-checking him into the dining room table, and the table cracking down the center, rising on either side of them like a cage. Eames has his hands in Arthur’s hair, on Arthur’s thigh-Arthur has his left forearm braced over Eames’ neck, cutting off his air.
They breathe. Well, Arthur breathes. Eames tries.
Eames is not sure which one of them gets his fly open, though Eames knows he’s the one to undo Arthur’s because the pin of the belt punctures his thumb. He also knows that his hand is the first one around both of their cocks, because Arthur’s the one to cry out and arch down, the one to realign their legs as much as they can in the ruins of the table so he can grab on too. Arthur’s forearm never moves, never lets Eames up, he can feel the starch of his shirt thickening with sweat, feel the strain that ripples up Arthur’s bones to the one that’s clearly broken. But after that, it’s harder to know, harder to see or say clearly. One of them grinds. One of them tightens. One of them pulls their bodies even closer, buries Arthur’s face in the crook of Eames’ delightfully abused neck. Eames holds Arthur by the hair and bites down on his fractured collarbone, makes him scream, makes him hold out longer, makes him know-makes him surge, harden in their hands.
The table hadn’t fully broken. It does now, jolts them to the floor like a kick, when Eames starts fucking their tangled hands, when Arthur shoves him back down and sets them thrusting faster. Eames laughs-that might be the concussion-and Arthur groans, but damned if that isn’t music to Eames’ ears. He tightens his grip on Arthur’s hair, feels the gel start to stick to his palm, even as that same sweat just makes the jack of their other hands all the easier.
Eames knows Arthur’s body, now. He knows the shape of his cock, the pace of his breath, the kind of half-formed words he says when he wants to come and doesn’t want to beg. He knows the alignment of every muscle in Arthur’s right hand, the weight of his chest, the spread of his thighs, the source of every single hair, every vein, every nerve. He knows how close Arthur gets to the edge of his own control, how he clings to it like a cliff with a miles-long drop.
There’s still more. Eames is convinced that there will always be more.
He comes first, shuddering against Arthur’s hand, chest, cock-Eames twists Arthur’s neck so he can look Arthur in the eyes when he follows. If Arthur’s hands and hips hadn’t done it, his face would have. Eames will put that face on, those lips, those eyes, that wanting, every time he’s alone with a mirror in his mind.
It doesn’t feel done, but they lay still, tangled and soaked and as splintered as the table. Arthur lifts his forearm off Eames’ throat a bit later than Eames would have liked, but Eames unwinds his fist from Arthur’s hair and calls it all, inwardly, square. Arthur’s breath is heaving as if he, not Eames, was the one practically strangled into orgasm. Perhaps, for Arthur’s body, it’s the same.
When Eames can move his arms again, it’s to start trying to remove his shirt. His semen-slick fingers struggle through two buttons before he remembers this is a dream. It has to be; Arthur is helping him out of his clothes instead of shooting him in the head. It’s all very funny. And Arthur’s fingers are surprisingly clumsy like this. Eames laughs, settles into the wreckage, and spreads his palm on Arthur’s lower back. Arthur hisses in through his teeth. Eames can feel the heavy pulse of the bruises through Arthur’s suit.
“Yes,” Arthur says, quietly, as if admitting to a crime. For a moment Eames is annoyingly confused as to why, but then Arthur has gotten Eames’ shirt off-it tears on the shattered wood-and is speaking with his mouth pressed close to the tattoo on Eames’ left shoulder. “Yes. I stopped dreaming before I left the military. So did you.”
Eames laughs. It makes the red edges of his vision swell. “There’s a lot about me you know, isn’t there.”
“More than you’d like me to,” Arthur says.
“You are very good at your job, aren’t you, Darling.”
“I have to be.”
Were that some kind of resolution, Arthur would be smiling. That’s not the expression Eames feels where Arthur’s mouth rests on his skin. But Eames can duplicate it. And he will.
Arthur removes his jacket and shirts-Eames has to help with all three, and palms the increasingly evident broken collarbone before Arthur stands. He doesn’t help Eames, and by the time Eames gets to his feet, Arthur has already left the room, looking for something. Arthur’s search isn’t frantic, but determined, always looking at walls and behind doors and finding only the paintings he’d hung. Eames is about to make a crack about conjuring up some condoms when it dawns on him.
Eames builds Arthur a mirror. He hangs it, just a touch crooked, between an Escher and a Hockney.
Arthur fucks him into it.
-
Eames wakes up with a gentle abruptness, like he’s taken a step down a stair a decimeter too deep. He has a ridiculous headache, a fire in his lungs, a crust at the corner of his eyes, and a somewhat insistent erection.
This was, he thinks, one of his better ideas.
Arthur, though, is already out of the desk chair, disconnecting from the IV and bracing himself on the desk. Eames stands up, insinuates himself behind Arthur, touches his back and collar. “Better than relativity, isn’t it?” He wonders if Arthur’s stillness is a kind of invitation. “Actuality.”
Arthur had been hanging his head. His hair is disobliged to the laws of gravity by virtue of, in reality, still being gelled down pat, despite the sheen of sweat on his forehead. When he lifts, the gesture bares his throat, nestles him in along Eames’ neck. “It would be,” he agrees, following Eames’ meaning without offering more to it. “But we’ve got work to do.”
Eames groans against the nape of Arthur’s neck, nips the collarbone that by all rights should be in need of more attention than just his. “It’s a good thing I respect you,” he says, stepping aside. “Otherwise I would feel extremely insulted.”
“You should,” Arthur says.
“What, be insulted?”
“No. Respect me.”
He permits Arthur to leave him there, to just push off the desk and go. Eames takes a moment to unwind from the PASIV, and sits in Arthur’s chair, appropriating his residual warmth.
-
“Did Hoffman finally pay you?”
Eames tells him, “Haven’t checked this morning,” and continues to filch the hotel’s Internet. He brings up his bank notices, logs in. “Yes, but it hasn’t cleared.”
“Check again tomorrow,” Arthur says. In the background on his side of the line, a raucous cheer goes up, and Eames misses anything else Arthur might just have said.
“What was that?”
“I said it’s cleared Stateside, shouldn’t be more than a day longer for you.”
“Christ, man, where are you?”
“Ascot.”
“You’re at Ascot when I’m in bloody Morocco? Who won?”
“Hurdy-Gurdy. My share just tripled.”
Eames groans. “Just you wait, Arthur Darling.”
“What, did you have money on Lady MacDuff?”
“Not enough to count.” He smiles, despite himself and the equatorial heat. “I’ll make it back.”
“You always do.”
It would be a silence that hangs between them, save for the cheering crowds and ebullient announcers on Arthur’s side of the line, and the bustling crowds beneath Eames’s second-storey hotel room. Eames watches one in the marked absence of the other, and reels the conversation in.
“Cobb’s square?”
“Yeah, glad his share came through today. They jacked up the price on his Anniversary suite this year. And you?”
“Another job in the works here. I’ll be middling around Africa for a while, I’m not wanted at all on this continent.”
“I was about to say.”
Eames leers into the mouthpiece of his phone, and asks if Arthur was about to say something else.
“Yes,” Arthur says. “I’ll be in touch, Mr. Eames.”
-
---
-
.